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Mateusz

Harrison Linklater Abbott

Mateusz was the classic music and film nerd in his adolescence, constantly tormented by his high school peers who fathomed all kinds of popular insults. Popular because they became renowned across the teenage population; penis jokes, nervous twitch jokes, Polish jokes. Mateusz had a sublime knowledge of good movies and bands and he figured this would be a good way to communicate with people as the kids got a little bit older in the school years. But it just made the kids hate him more because his knowledge clashed with theirs, and the mocking got worse. He’d had a few run-ins with the ‘other’ side of the kids in his year. i.e. the ‘popular’ crowd who were called the ‘neds’. There was heavy snow one February day which cast anarchy amongst the ned ranks. The football fields beyond the high school grounds, lunch time; no supervisors to be seen. All the kids were throwing snowballs and it turned in to an enormous brawl. One year of neds against the other. 50 to 100 lads, ripely pubescent boys lobbing water at each other ... No wonder ... Mateusz observed another stranger lad lobbing a snowball at him, so he threw one back. Next second the boy has rugby tackled him and he was on the floor. Mateusz stood and did a kung-fu noise with his mouth, to retaliate, and it was embarrassing and everybody else laughed, nor did his own year help him.
Mateusz spent the next weeks unable to sleep, imagining how to revenge himself against this unknown assailant. He passed the kid a few times in the corridor, to the other’s silence and downlooking eyes. Then a month after he was in the common room with some people, and he noticed the same lad with his cronies. They were sitting close by at another table. In detention, the three of them, and they had to clean up the common room. Mateusz tried to make a joke, and it was a bad joke, and his assailant and his two friends laughed, falsely and as viciously as they could. Up from the squalid towns wherein their parents and grandparents were reared, above the simple explanations of poor parenting and childish cruelty. After that incident, Mateusz couldn’t know how to forgive, and he’d already turned, against both community sides in the high school. There were the uncool kids who had rejected his love for music, and the neds who had attacked him. Mateusz would pass the assailant every day, on his way to school. See the other lad from the bus window as he looked down. The lad with his pals, always smiling, it seemed. The lad didn’t get on his bus; he got the other school bus which arrived at the same stop. Mateusz imagined bringing in a hammer in his back-pack, getting off at the same bus stop, hammering the assailant in the head. And, after thinking about it so many times, the ideal of revenge so great, he finally did it. After an argument with his mother, one night, Mateusz just went and did it. It was the awry relationship with his mother, and all the small penis jibes and the nervous tick remarks and all the slights against his nationality. Mateusz walked out of the bus doors and he took his bag off as the steam whooshed out of the doors closing behind him. He brought the hammer out of his bag and his assailant stood there just looking as Mateusz approached. Mateusz thumped him gloriously on the face and then the rest of the skull, as the assailant’s cronies watched. It was vengeance in its pure path; he watched the eyes of the boy whirl and then stop, aside the taut confusion of his facial muscles. Nobody could stop Mateusz. Most of the morning traffic drove on, despite slowing down momentarily to see what was going on.

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